ROSALIND BRACKENBURY'S BONNARD'S DOG

This is a terrific collection of poems. Full disclosure, my last book, SWING THEORY, was published in May by the same publisher, Hanging Loose Press. But I never met Rosalind Brackenbury until the publication party and even then we didn't talk so I had no idea who she was or what her poetry was like.

But among the stack of books by my bed is her BONNARD'S DOG which I've been reading a few poems out of every night or so and find myself almost always delighted with what I read. Like this one:

MAYBE

Maybe it's the darkness under pine branches,
the underside of a red leaf in the wind.
Maybe the white ferry
coming into harbor.

Or the sound of footsteps
in the alleyway,
children's shouts
at the end of the road.

It's so slight you may not notice it;
it's the rustle of bell heather,
the body of the dragonfly over the brown pool
this afternoon—

not a flit or a dive exactly, more like
a shimmering.
It's the impossibility of choosing.
It's being chosen.




or this one:


LIFE, AGAIN

Once I sat in a knitted suit, rapt
at a bucket of wet sand;

there's a photo—my first beach,
everyone's, postwar
and the barbed wire gone.

I wore a cotton hat.
Nobody interrupted.

Now, I'm back. Sea, and the space
where sand gleams, and the tide.

Same mystery.